Posts by JimmyPage 3225 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
No. Nationwide do too. In fact I thought it was standard in UK online banking.
If it isn't I suggest folks move to banks where it is, and apply some market forces.
With 2FA, even if you physically managed to take control of my session, you'd be scuppered as any transaction out of my accounts requires me to re-validate it with the reader.
I can't say why they quoted that figure. And once they had taken the position that they should charge, I immediately lost any and all interest in EE/the-artist-formerly-known-as-Orange providing me with anything more than junk mail I can use as fuel. I'm sure if I had challenged/escalated they would have "waived" it (don't forget, the phone - bought outright - cost £5).
So I'm a *big* fan of unlocked handsets being sold new. And Wileyfox is worth a big-up (although their customer service isn't. Where's my free case ????).
Up until a few weeks ago, I had a box with all the old phones family Page had ever had - 12 of the buggers. They all worked, in that they powered up.
And I could not get single one working. All due to network locking.
The one which made me see red was a £5 Alcatel originally from Orange that refused to work with an EE SIM (remind me again, where EE came from ?). EE wanted £35 to unlock it.
So a network-free, telco-free phone sounds grand. Having had 3 months use of my Wileyfox Swift, it's the way to go.
older El Reggers may remember a very decent sci-fi/fact magazine of the 80s, called OMNI (had occasional interviews with Feynman, et al). They devoted a lot of column inches to alternative ways of getting into space - including laser sails.
Sadly the ultimate conclusion then (as I suspect now) was aiming beam at the target - when a 1cm laser beam diverges to 400m over the 250,000 miles to the moon ....
They even suggested bulking up the laser to shorten acceleration times !
So, 30 year old "news".
The upshot - and possible Holy Grail - of laser sails is you are accelerating towards the speed of light. I vaguely recall in terms of efficiency, laser sails the best bet of getting to a decent speed.
I notice a poster has asked how you slow it down. Back in the 1980s, the solution was proposed to ..... turn it off at the halfway point, and let deceleration take over.
My shopping list for a new phone is:
1) Dual SIM
2) No carrier/manufacturer bloat of any description
3) No network lock
4) removable battery
5) MicroSD slot
I arrived at this list, after my son lost (another) phone, and going through my box of 12 *working* phones, not a single one could be used. (The most annoying was a little 5 year old Orange phone bought for £10 that refused to work with an EE SIM - EE wanted £35 to "unlock" it).
So, I'm rocking a Swift with 2xgiffgaff SIMs. But, if I decide to change networks, I will.
I once shared a house with an Irish chap, whose brother spent all 1985s ESC with a pad, drawing a grid to "prove" the rest of Europe was out to "get the Irish".
Well, I say all ESC, we went down the pub. But when we got back, he had filled it all out ....
Only one icon for that memory ....
Which is where we're headed anyway, with autonomous cars. Even if private ownership of an autonomous car will be possible, the rewards for people who pimp out their cars in their downtime (e.g 10:00-16:00 weekdays when they are at work, and 19:00-06:00 when they are at home) will blur the boundaries further.
However, for MrsJP, whose sight isn't good enough to drive, the idea of mobility as a service isn't as cringeworthy as the (presumably fully able) author suggests.
Where's the "bring it on" icon ?
that the biggest challenge to space exploration is the earths' gravity.
Is there any work on a space elevator ?
<daydreaming>I wonder how trying to drop a 100km wire from orbit would work out ...
alternatively a stupidly long slightly inclined (magnetic ?) runway to accelerate a capsule to escape velocity (a la Netwons cannonball orbiter).
not that I am aware of.
The ACC half baked ideas reference is from an interview I read with him, where he commented he had floated so many ideas in fiction or speculation that had become reality.
The most famous idea being the geosynchronous communications satellite.
In a nod to another comment I have made today, he also proposed a space elevator, to reduce the energy required to get into LEO.
I once worked on a sizeable project in Weath Managment.
Written in VB (I hail from a C/C++ background) they had tried to be "all grown up" and name variables correctly. So you had iCount, dblPrice, strName etc.
Problem was, they were all variants.
Which meant, if there was a fuck-up in the chain, and a string got accepted for a numeric value, the error could be propagated a long way from the source.
Here's an example
https://www.truecaller.com/support#/Android/a23
"Google introduced a limitation on Android 4.4 (Kitkat) and above, which unfortunately prevents the SMS blocking feature from working."
Can't speak as to Google Messenger blocking, as I gave up.
As usual, the Windows Phone implementation of this feature is flawlessly perfect.
Here's a whole thread on how you can't block SMS on Android post KitKat.
http://forums.androidcentral.com/nexus-6p/618966-blocking-sms-marshmallow.html
Admittedly, SMS blocking might be regarded as a niche feature by some. But Googles making it impossible without any warning, consultation or workaround is reason enough for me to stand by my assertion that Android is OK for toys, but not ready for business.
Last year, I looked to implement WP8 "Block" feature on MrsJPs MotoG.
That's block *SMS*s - not just calls.
A deep trawl of the Play Store revealed an abundance of "Call & SMS" blocking Apps.
A deeper trawl revealed that SMS blocking had become impossible when Google went from KK to LL (if memory serves) they changed the architecture so apps couldn't access the SMS stack *before* they were processed. Meaning there were (are ?) shedloads of "sms blocking apps" which have to state upfront they don't actually work.
WTF ?
That's Android for you.
Dr. Wibble is pretty much echoing my thinking, about the birthday paradox (the recent Challenger anniversary is a stark reminder of how easily statistics can be misunderstood).
However, it goes a lot deeper than that. Starting with the problem that until such time as the UK has a credible life/death/in country register, there's no way to CLEAN the fucker.
So slowly, and surely, the database will grow.
And grow.
So, fast forward to 2026, when the DNA database contains (say) 60,000,000 records. Including some dead. Some left the UK. Some moved.
(Remember, the DNA database is a *hash* of the genome, not the entire genome itself).
So a crime is committed, and DNA recovered. SOP runs it through the database, and - horror of horrors - 5 matches are returned. (The real horror is that it means the police now have to do some fucking police work). Of course the 4 spurious matches are a god-given gift to a lawyer who remembers that "reasonable doubt" is all that is needed for an acquittal. So the police have to try and eliminate the 4 spurious matches.
My explanation of the DNA database it that it's like a surname, house number, and area-level postcode. Which means there will be lots of SMITH-16-NW in there.
*presumably, the ANPR system has a link with the DVLA so scrapped cars are archived off. Or will it face the same degradation issues ?
All this, in the face of my assertion that *any* non trivial database of personal data can never be more than 95% accurate. A rule of thumb I devised after seeing thousands of man-hours in a commercial organisation devoted (over summer) to calling every customer to update their details, and seeing the accuracy improve (from 90%) to 95%, only to slip to 90% within 2 months. Databases being snapshots of a transient reality.
None of which is understood by the bottom-feeders in parliament, and their lickspittle civil servants who all dodged anything vaguely technical as "for the proles".
We'll all be well fucked if it becomes possible to make DNA from scratch.
I live in SW Brum. There's a massive ASDA 15 *walk* from my house (I used to walk there and back as a morning constitutional when the weather wasn't shit).
There's a Morrisons 10 minutes drive, and 5 minutes beyond that a Sainsburys.
5 minute drive gets me to Harborne, where there's a Waitrose (2 miles from the Asda). And 5 minutes drive to Quinton gets me to Tescos.
And in the past, just to prove to SWMBO, I have gone to all 5, and we have seen (apart from own-brand, obviously) they stock (or *don't*) stock exactly the same things.
So, as with genomes that get lazy, and are all susceptible to the same disease, the big supermarkets appear to have become so homogenised it should be childs play to differentiate from them, and steal their customers. And the smaller more niche outlets can stop being so smug. (Looks at the "delicatessens" in the West Midlands who also stock identikit products - and not what I'd want).
No you can't. You can choose what you want from what the supermarket wants to stock. Bearing in mind I suspect their priorities will centre around delivering maximum £/cm2 of floor area. What are your priorities.
As I mentioned upthread, there are varieties of *already stocked* brands we can't get at *any* of our local supermarkets.
If I had time, I could draw you up a weekly shopping list you'd be unable to fulfil from Sainsburys, Morrisons, Asda, Tesco, or Waitrose in a single shop. And (if it comes to Ainsleys Shropshire Pea soup) not even then.
Example of market fail: Sungold tomatoes.
And that's quite before you deal with Sainsburys endemic stock control problems (ongoing since 1982 when I worked for them).
My only pause to defend the big markets is that they are very driven by *what they can sell*, which is function of fashion (Bake-off, etc). Being of Italian extraction, stranded in the wastes of the Midlands, I am well aware of how shops are forced to stock what Jocasta and Sebastian saw on "Come Dine With Me" last week. Which is also a factor in farmers markets (still no Sungold tomatoes). That's *if* you live near enough to one. (Luckily, bohemian Harborne, Birmingham, has a monthly one).
then I humbly suggest you aren't very good at your business.
The only reason I shop at Sainsburys is geography. It's not the closest supermarket, but it's next to a nice Costa for a post-shop latte. That's the only difference between Sainsburys, Asda, Morrisons, Tesco and Waitrose. All of which are less than 20 minutes drive from me.
When 5 *massive* businesses are (a) shit and (b) indistinguishable, then it's time for Amazon or whoever to show them up.
MrsJP is a fan of Ainsleys "Shropshire Pea soup" (no accounting for taste)
Unavailable at any of our local megamarts (I mean *big*).
Had to order from Amazon !
I would welcome Amazon "disrupting" the grocery market. It might mean I can buy what *I* want, not what the supermarkets want to sell to me.
Oh yes !
We currently pack 1,400 sq. feet in our 2-bed bunglalow. (OK, we have a toilet/cloakroom, bin store, utility room plus a hall to access them).
Currently I have yet to see a *4* bedroom house (which, don't forget has an EXTRA FLOOR) with more than 1,200 sq. feet.
Get fed up of looking at new builds in 2014. Best way to shut the sales droid up was to ask which room they suggested we lose to move into the new build.
And as for "garages" ????? Can't we have a law forcing developers to call them what they are: "external storage units" ?
It's not *paying* I object to.
It's paying 100s of individual itty-bitty subscriptions.
The day someone (and it may be Google. Or Apple. Or Amazon) can find a way to charge me a*single* daily/weekly/monthly/premium, and allow me direct access to *whatever I want*, is the day I will take their hand off.
Those El-Reggerrs who agree, and would also subscribe, upvote me (I predict there will be loads).
The fact no such service exists, despite "market pressure" is a very good sign the market is well fucked.
(actually it was an ITT 2020).
AIR Apples had no intrinsic networking, and I don't recall an interface card to do it either, although it did have 6 expansion slots.
For some reason the standard one for the disk controller was 6. I can still remember the command "PR#6" to initialise the peripheral on slot 6. I realised I was the schools (actually the boroughs) tech expert when reading the manual revealed that "PR" was to initialise for output (PRint - geddit ?) and "IN" was to initialise for "INput" (possibly a light pen) and that for the disk controller (being both, either would work).
1) If it's possible.
Many "lock down everything" IT departments remove the mouse settings. Happened to me once, when I attended an interview. They had a technical test on a standard RHS mouse PC. I asked for the mouse to be set up left handed, and it took 30 minutes for them to find a tech who could log in as admin to make the change.
2) If it's practical
There's quite a few industry-wide mice that are clearly intended to be held in the right hand. So even changing settings won't help.
FWIW, ever since I started suffering a touch of RSI, I've found I'm ambidextrous when it comes to mousing, so use my left hand now.
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